Continuing on with a work-in-progress of one of my current story book projects, 'The Legend of the Jersey Devil.' 

Last time I shared a few of the character design sketches and preliminary color of the final design. This week I want to share a few thumbnails.

For those who aren't familiar with this step, the idea of thumbnails is to take the entire book and lay down some general ideas for image placement in an effort to get a feel for how the story will flow visually. There's no attempt at any real accuracy or finality, merely a preliminary take on timing, page-turns, layout and feeling. Basically, these are the equivalent of movie storyboards

The design team handed over manuscript and told me to go to town with my ideas. It's pretty intimidating having such open-ended freedom to chooses how to frame the story. I mean, you pretty much can do ANYTHING. I've been given book projects in the past with very specific directions from the design teams outlining what they wanted included in the layouts. Which is fine. But 'Jersey Devil' is one of only a handful of projects where I've been given carte blanche to go in whichever direction I felt appropriate.

So I pretty much sat staring at my computer for a few hours in complete horror as I contemplated how I could really screw this up. Once the initial horror wore off, images started suggesting themselves as I began to thinking in terms of movie framing and angles. Suddenly things started clicking.

Thumbnails can be wonderfully perfect as simple stick figures and nothing more. But given the atmospheric nature of this story, I felt something a bit more involved would be appropriate. I needed to get an idea of how many dark images there might be so I could figure out how to best break them up and keep them from dominating the design. Which is why I thought pages with inset images would help give some visual breaks.

I sent the thumbnails off the the designers and they came back to me with suggestions for changes or further development. As an illustrator it's easy to fall in love with your images. And it's easy to take personal offense at any suggested changes. But it's necessary to keep a healthy distance between yourself and your images because there are a lot of factors involved in the give and take of making a book. There's very little room for prima donnas in this work.

So now I'm working on revisions. The next step will be more detailed sketches which take us closer to final art.